The Identity Project - Final

In the end, I'm really pleased with the end result. I didn't make too many changes from the rough draft, but there were some. I took Adrienne's suggestion about using all caps for the name, and I think that helped solidify things a good deal. I also played around with the idea of integrating color, but it just threw off the unity of the piece. It would have been cool to add some element of red to my hair, but I think the glasses do a good enough job identifying as the figure.

I think that this project has been one of the most beneficial. I really think that I will end up using this logo in the future.

The Identity Project - Roughs

So for many of the roughs, there wasn't that much difficulty in their construction, so I'm not sure how much I can talk about them without waffling on about meaningless details. But I'll do what I can.

Starting with the simple monogram, there wasn't much to it. I found a good serif font and then expanded the forms so I could move them about freely. One adjustment I did was that I thinned the posts of the H, they would have been too thick otherwise. I did have to look around for an "s" that really fit. About halfway through, Adrienne offered the suggestion that it might work better if I tilted the s so it could interact with the h. I wasn't sure how I felt about this but thought I'd give it a shot so I made another design really quick. This went over very well in critique. We came to the conclusion that my other design, while I still like how it looks when I draw it by hand, looked too stuffy for a personal logo when generated on the computer.

The blockfort design didn't really change from what I had in my thumbnail sketches. I struggled a little bit with getting the rectangles to the size I wanted, and moved the internal lines around a lot. After critique we decided that it might work better if I thickened up the lines. I could also try to level the lines in the s with the lines in the H. I couldn't think of any good use of color for it though. I simply have an aversion to color in general. It comes from working in drawing for so long. Whenever I added color to drawings their quality went downhill and they quickly look childish. So I stick to black and white. That's why none of my identity designs use color, as a reference to my drawings, which is my major focus.

The shattered S was a disappointment. It may simply be my treatment of the piece, but it definitely reach the lofty heights Adrienne thought possible. I think it may have worked better if I had use different shapes as opposed to the linear method I used.
Please disregard the phantom s to the right, I must have forgotten to delete it in my AI file. I'm bad about tucking things off into corners on that program.

The chain design turned out much better. I set off the T from the rest of the H by a subtle value difference. Otherwise, it was fairly easy to connect all of the letter forms together. This was one of the favorite during our critique. They thought the connection was good, and that the T was hidden enough it didn't smack them in the face. Suggestions were that the sideway s drew too much attention to the left. A possible solution to this would be flipping it vertical and wrapping it around the T that way. I'm just afraid of that looking a little cliche.

Finally came the silhouette design. I ad my roommate take pictures of me so I could use my own profile, and I think that really made the extra connection. For the font at the bottom I just used Eurostile because I really like the simplicity and straightforwardness of the letterforms. I just traced it with the pen tool and and made the shape of my glasses white. Then I just made me lean up against the H and there it was. This was by far the favorite of everyone during the critique of my work. They thought it captured my personality the best, and they really enjoyed how the silhouette could easily be identified as me. There was the question of how it would look if you could see my arms and legs. Luckily, I had made a test version of that as well. In the end, the all black version worked better because the grey in the other design was too distracting. I'm going to continue with this design, and I don't think I have that many changes to make. Adrienne thinks it would be wise to make the name at the bottom all caps so as to minimize the up and down movement, which would in turn help ground the entire piece. I also needed to pull in the letters with the edge of my shoes. Adrienne also thought it would be interesting to maybe make the figure a different color, but as I mentioned earlier, I prefer to black and white. I'm not saying I won't give it a try, but I'm highly biased.

The Identity Project - Thumbnails

Our final project for Visual Communication 1 was to design a logo or graphic identity for ourselves. Our guidelines were that we our design had to be reproducible in in both large and small sizes, and we had the option of creating both a color and black and white version of the design.
Adrienne suggested that we start off by asking our friends and family to give five words that describe us. I decided to give it a shot, and sent about 50 emails to people. The next day my inbox was flooded, and I had to sift through about eight million adjectives. Luckily there was some element of overlap between them all. As much as I wanted to do a design emphasizing my "gangsta"-ness, I decided my design would be geared towards the more common descriptions. Some of the more common words were: intelligent, genuine, calm (laid back), kind, curly red hair, passionate, sincere, and unique. I was a little daunted by the task of graphically representing these things, but I guess thats why we needed to make 50 thumbnails, so we could have lots of mulligans.

So I could describe each and every one of my thumbnails and the thought process behind it, but instead I'll just go over the five designs I decided to turn into roughs.
The first one was simply a monogram that I've been signing my drawings with for some time now. I first began thinking about designing a personal monogram after writing a paper on Albrecht Durer last semester. I really liked how he incorporated his initials into his work and I decided to see what I could come up with for myself. The design up in the left hand corner is what I came up with.

The next design I decided to work with was what I would later call the blockfort logo. It was just a simple representation of an S and an H. It was simple, yet united, so I think it fit with my list of characteristics. My favorite part was the lines I used to define the crossbar of the H were actually T's, which made the subtle reference to my middle name. Adrienne and I discussed that this would also be a good design to incorporate color into.










The third design was really just a blip of an idea, that I would make an S out of my last name. Adrienne was surprisingly taken with this idea. She thought though that rather than using type to make the S, I should just try and make sort of broken letter form. I thought that might not be too bad, and it would be unified while still comprised of smaller parts, which I think I can relate too.







Next came a design that I based on the idea of a chain. Chains are flexible but strong, and I think that it would make a good reference to my own personality and work. At first I couldn't think of a way to interlock all of my initials. The T was the big problem, but Adrienne's suggestion of incorporating it into the H seemed like a great solution, so I thought it would be cool to see how this design would turn out on the computer, so I decided to work on it some more.
Finally, my last design was yet another playful design. I thought it would be cool if I just had a the H with a silhouette of a person just chilling up against it. I really thought this wouldbe neat because I'm often the person sitting back and observing while things are going on. I like to take my time and enjoy things as they come. I thought this would be cool, so we'll see how it and the others turn out in comps.